Americans Still Favor Global Intervention -- FDR-Style

If you want to understand the fracas over Syrian chemical weapons
as a chapter in American history, I'd suggest starting with these
words: "For nearly seven decades the United States has been the
anchor of global security. ... Out of the ashes of world war, we
built an international order and enforced the rules that gave it
meaning.... Even a limited strike will send a message to Assad
that no other nation can deliver. ... Now is the time to show the
world that America keeps our commitments. ... We do what we say."

That's a pastiche from Barack Obama's two major speeches on Syria
(August
31 and September
10). The message was coded, but easy enough to decipher: America
still has more of a commitment than any other nation to enforce the
rules of the international order, because we built that order. The
rules we made are the "red line" that Syria crossed. Now
Syria must be punished, and only the U.S. can do the punishing --
indeed must do the punishing, if only to prove that the U.S. is still
a credible enforcer.

I don't suggest that this is a key to deciphering Obama's true
motives. No one can read his mind to ferret out his motives. Perhaps
even Obama himself isn't really sure of his true motives.

But if you want to put Obama's initial eagerness to attack Syria,
and his later step back from the brink, in the context of American
history, these words from his speeches are the key -- especially his
reference to "the ashes of world war," obviously meaning
World War II.

When the Germans conquered most of continental Europe in 1940 and
raised fears of an imminent attack on Britain, Franklin D. Roosevelt
launched a skillful campaign to persuade Americans to pay for a huge
increase in military weaponry and send as much as needed to the
British to defend themselves. But, FDR promised, U.S. troops would
never go to Europe or anywhere else in the world. The U.S. could help
win this war without risking a drop of American blood; in today's
jargon, he promised "no boots on the ground." Of course the
bombing of Pearl Harbor ended that vision of bloodless victory.

But by 1942 FDR was telling people (quite privately) about his
utopian postwar vision for lasting peace on earth. The story was
quite simple: Nations go to war only if they have the weapons to do
it. Take away their weapons, and -- presto! -- no more war. Eternal
peace would let the United States go on freely trading with, and
profiting from, every nation on earth forever.

Of course someone had to be strong enough to take away all those
weapons and make sure no one else could obtain new ones. So four
nations would be exempt from the command to disarm. The U.S.,
Britain, Russia, and China would be the world's "four
policemen," as FDR called them, each enforcing the rules in
their own part of the world.

However "by 1944 Roosevelt's musings about the four world
policemen had faded into the background," as Martin Sherwin
wrote in A World Destroyed, his classic history of how the
atomic bomb reshaped world diplomacy in the 1940s. FDR was getting
encouraging reports from the Manhattan Project and growing optimistic
that the United States would have soon have an atomic bomb.

The fateful decision he made was to share the bomb and knowledge
of how to make it only with the Britain and not with any other nation
-- including, most importantly, Russia. FDR was misled into thinking
that the U.S. and Britain could keep an atomic monopoly for two
decades or more. So, he assumed, there would actually be only two
policemen.

Even though Roosevelt hoped for postwar cooperation with the
Russians, "the underlying idea" of his original plan, as
Sherwin wrote, "the concept of guaranteeing world peace by the
amassing of overwhelming military power, remained a prominent feature
of his postwar plans." And not a drop of American blood would
ever have to be shed.

After Roosevelt's death, the Truman administration made that
concept the most prominent feature of America's postwar plan -- the
international order that, as Obama said, the U.S. built out of the
ashes of world war.

Harry Truman came increasingly under the sway of cold war hawks,
who turned back all efforts to cooperate with the Russians on
anything related to the bomb. Our national commitment -- the
responsibility we awarded ourselves in 1945 -- was to enforce the new
world order and keep the peace by ourselves, brandishing the bomb (or
as Truman called it "the hammer").

Of course the Soviet Union was not nearly as intimidated by that
"hammer" as Truman and his cold warriors hoped. It took
over 40 years to persuade the Soviets to stop competing for the title
of global enforcer.

But for more than twenty years now the United States has held
undisputed claim to the title of the world's sole indispensable
superpower. And, as in the cold war era, Americans still generally
justify that claim with a simple moral tale of good (that's us)
against evil (that's whomever we happen to be opposing at the
moment).

Chemical Weapons and WMDs

Back in the 1940s, with all attention focused on the atomic bomb,
chemical and biological weapons didn't get much public attention.
Only in recent years were they lumped together with nuclear weapons
under the umbrella term "WMDs." But the principle that
prevailed in U.S. foreign policymaking circles remained the same: We
alone would enforce the rules and red lines of the international
game, because we alone would have the power to do it.

The U.S. has signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, the
international agreement calling on signatories to destroy their
stocks of chemical weapons, and U.S. chemical weapons stockpiles are
being destroyed (though much more slowly than the Convention called
for; the U.S. claims it will finish the job only 11 years behind
schedule).

At the same time, though, U.S. leaders have emphasized a kind of
equivalence between chemical and nuclear weapons. They have
often said that their response to any chemical attack would be
"devastating," with no weapons ruled out -- which implies,
despite the calculated ambiguity, a clear threat of nuclear
retaliation.

There's another obvious link between nuclear and chemical weapons.
In American political culture, both are framed within the same
dualistic narrative: Some WMDs are acceptable, some are unacceptable,
and you damn well better know the difference, or else the enforcer
will soon be at your doorstep.

How to know which is which? The enforcer will decide and then let
you know, explaining it all with the familiar tale of good versus
evil. And if your WMDs are unacceptable, the enforcer will fulfill
his commitments and do what he has been saying he'd do for the past
70 years: punish you. After all, his credibility is on the (red)
line.

That narrative goes back to the fateful decision Franklin
Roosevelt made: a British atomic bomb would be acceptable. A Soviet
atomic bomb would be unacceptable.

Today we see the same dualism played out around the world. Iran
must be prevented, at all costs, from obtaining even one nuclear
weapon. Meanwhile, its neighbors to the east (Pakistan and India) and
not far to the west (Israel) are perfectly entitled to keep expanding
their nuclear arsenals. The U.S. is perfectly entitled to keep who
knows how many nuclear weapons stationed in South Korea. But North
Korea is a dangerous, even monstrous, threat because it has a tiny
handful.

The same dualistic principle applies to chemical weapons. When
Syrians opposed to Bashar al-Assad stockpiled and very
possibly used them, Washington uttered not a peep. Those WMDs
are, apparently, acceptable. But if Assad did indeed use similar
weapons himself, they are totally unacceptable and he must be
punished.

Similarly, we are urged to be outraged that Assad refuses to sign
the Chemical Weapons Convention; his very possession of the weapons
is unacceptable. But we hear not a word about his most powerful
regional rivals, Israel and Egypt, refusing to sign the same
Convention. Their chemical weapons are, apparently, acceptable --
even if Egypt once actually used them in
Yemen years ago.

Sometimes the very same chemical weapons can be transformed from
one category to the other. It all depends on the context. Most
famously, Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons in the 1980s was
acceptable to the United States. By 2003, that same event had become
utterly unacceptable, offered as prime evidence that he must have
WMDs, including the nuclear kind, and therefore must be destroyed.

The moral of the story is clear: The global policeman's
responsibility is to decide which WMDs are unacceptable and then to
punish those nations that use or even obtain them, because those
nations are bad guys by definition (a definition marked "made in
USA"). Every president since FDR has embraced that as a
foundational mythic narrative of U.S. foreign policy.

THE LATEST CHAPTER: SYRIA

Obama, having placed Assad's chemical weapons in the category of
unacceptable, called the world to act out the venerable myth once
again. Of course he didn't get quite the answer he expected.

His first ran in to trouble because Roosevelt's idea of the "four
policemen" never really died. It was enshrined in the UN
Security Council, in the form of the permanent members. (France was
added as a fifth world cop, as a last minute afterthought, when the
UN was created in 1945.)

To prove their status as the world's most powerful nations, all
five were given veto power -- which is why Obama couldn't use the
Security Council, the route he and everyone else would have
preferred, to legitimize an attack on Syria. Global cop Russia was
determined to veto it.

So Obama was forced to turn to the U.S. Congress for a stamp of
approval. Congress is packed with Republicans who were eager to stick
it to Obama any way they could. And on this issue they had t it easy,
because they could say in all honesty that most of the voters back
home were against an attack (even though most
believe Assad did use chemical weapons against civilians). Plenty
of Democrats got the same message from the voters, forcing them to
choose between embarrassing their president and defying the will of
the people, most of whom seemed
uninterested in being global enforcers.

The public's reluctance to use military force in Syria has sent
the pundits scurrying back to the FDR era -- this time to the years
just before the U.S. entered World War II, where they found what
seemed to be the obvious analogy: Once again, it seems, it's
interventionists versus isolationists.

But the analogy is actually quite mistaken. All the evidence
suggests that the U.S. public today is not at all loath to be
involved in war around the world. It just depends on how the war is
fought.

If it's fought with drones, even drones that kill American
citizens, there is some public controversy, but not a whole lot.
If it's fought with cyberspying, even cyberspying that scoops up
millions of American's phone calls and emails, there's more
controversy. But it's nothing nearly on the scale of the row over
attacking Syrian.

And then there are the issues that arouse no public discussion at
all: The massive U.S. arsenals of WMDs, and the smaller arsenals held
by U.S. allies. (Of course, they are all "acceptable" WMDs,
so what is there to discuss?); the fact that the U.S. military
capacity, as a whole, is vastly larger than any other nation's; and
the vast array of U.S. military bases around
the world, ready to wield that capacity everywhere at a moment's
notice.

In other words, the American public still accepts the vision that
FDR used against the "isolationists," the same vision he
later offered for world peace: the U.S. enforcing global order
without risking American blood.

What the American public won't accept, right now, is the risk of
shedding even a drop of American blood. After twelve gruesome and
apparently (to most Americans) pointless years of war in Iraq and
Afghanistan, most Americans simply wouldn't believe the president's
promise that no Americans would ever be sent to kill and die in
Syria.

So the public rejection of Obama's call for intervention had
nothing to do with pre-World War II "isolationism." It was,
rather, a hearty endorsement of FDR's ideal method of interventionism
(even making room for his idea of cooperating with the Russians). In
effect, it was a message to Obama that the nation has too often
strayed from FDR's plan; now it's time to get back on the track he
first plotted out over seven decades ago.

Does that mean the global policeman must hang up his badge? It
depends on the weapons the cop uses. As long as the policeman can
enforce the law with no risk to himself, he can keep that badge
pinned on proudly. But if he has to show up the old-fashioned way, in
person with gun in hand, and shoot down the bad guys, then it seems
the American version will have to hang up his badge -- at least for a
while.

For how long? No one can say. As so many
fictional policemen and sheriffs -- and Ronald Reagan and two
presidents Bush -- have shown us, a seemingly retired cop can always
be tempted to pick up his badge and gun and go out to the dusty
streets again, if evil threatens in an ugly enough form. It's a story
American audiences never seem to tire of. So I wouldn't write an
obituary for the old-fashioned global cop just yet.